Between 1878 and 1914, several thousand Muslim refugees from the Russian Empire’s North Caucasus region settled in Ottoman Transjordan. This paper explores the economic integration of the Circassian community in 1890-1914, with a particular emphasis on the development of the real estate market in the refugee settlement of Amman, which would later become the capital city of Jordan. This study argues that it was the convergence of refugee labor, Syrian and Palestinian capital, Ottoman infrastructure, and access to the Bedouin economy that led the transformation of the village of Amman into an important economic outpost on the nomadic frontier. This paper is based on Ottoman-language land registers and Arabic-language court records, new type of primary evidence in the study of Ottoman refugees. Through the study of archival documents, I trace the networks of capital in refugee colonies. Circassian villages, soon after their establishment, engaged in trade with nomadic communities, most notably in grain sale. In due time, Amman was integrated into commercial networks centered in Salt, Nablus, and Damascus. Syrian and Palestinian merchants bought land and houses from Caucasus refugees and established grain estates in the vicinity of refugee colonies. Many refugees benefited from the construction of the Hejaz Railway, which significantly improved opportunities for grain export and brought in additional Levantine capital to Transjordan. Through a focused regional case study, this paper invites a reevaluation of the role of refugees in “Ottoman capitalism.” It highlights refugees’ agency and focuses on small-scale networks of capital that operated in the interior and were borne out of the expansion of an international demand for grain and the transformation of land ownership and tenure in the wake of the 1858 Ottoman Land Code. This study moves away from a traditional viewpoint on refugees and the state, common in the fields of Ottoman history and refugee studies, to focus instead on refugees and the market. It views refugees as drivers of Ottoman capitalism and contends that Caucasus refugees accelerated the evolution of a new property regime and integration of Transjordan into the Levantine networks of capital.

In the mid-nineteenth century, Levantine Greek-Orthodox joint-stock companies became powerful forces in the expanding global capitalist economy. One important aspect of the families’ ascension was their creation of commercial estates on some of the most fertile land in Palestine’s Jezreel Valley and their establishment of intra-Levantine and cross-Mediterranean networks of agricultural business and trade. By examining changing property relations in the Jezreel Valley, business relations between Beirutis and their Levantine and European/Greek-Orthodox partners, and Levantine companies’ large-scale development and export of cotton, my paper argues that, from the mid-nineteenth century, a local variety of capitalist accumulation developed in the Levant as part of the wave of late-nineteenth-century globalization. Drawing on archives in Arabic, Hebrew, German, French, and Ottoman Turkish housed in Lebanon, the UK, France, Israel, and Turkey and employing the previously-unexamined private papers of the Sursuq, Bustrus, and Debbas families, my study contributes to theorizations of local and global capitalism through an investigation of the concomitant rise of Beirut and Haifa as metropolitan centers of capital, the formation of trans-regional Greek-Orthodox business-networks, and related forms of social and political negotiation and contestation in Palestine’s countryside. Scholarly debate persists on the nature of capitalist practices in the non-West. In recent years, social scientists have challenged the explicit or implicit Eurocentrism of structuralist or post-structuralist approaches to capitalism. These new works highlight fundamental gaps in our knowledge of the commercial history of the Levant and its place in investigations of global capitalism. My study inserts an investigation of the Levant’s Greek-Orthodox, trans-Mediterranean corporations into this current discussion and debate. Moreover, my study of Greek Orthodox networks shows how legal categories of land-tenure were more fluid, inconsistent, and contested under the Ottoman Empire than has previously been demonstrated. Finally, it moves the discussion of land in Palestine beyond the rigid Zionist vs. Palestinian Arab paradigm, by demonstrating how the rise of the Levantine joint-stock company and its participation in the world capitalist market altered local capitalist practices in the functioning of capitalism as an ongoing global process.

Modern agriculture would be impossible without chemical fertilizers produced from phosphate rock. The global rise of input-heavy farming practices in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries depended on access to phosphate-based fertilizers. In 1896, fifteen years after France established a protectorate in Tunisia, rich phosphate deposits were discovered in Tunisia’s Gafsa region. The phosphate industry quickly became France’s most important colonial interest in Tunisia. It utterly transformed the Gafsa region, left an indelible mark on Tunisian nationalism and decolonization, and fueled agricultural production in Europe and around the globe. This paper documents the role of Gafsa’s workers and their families in the new networks of capital that developed as Tunisia’s economy was reoriented to prioritize phosphate exports. I argue that modern Tunisia was indelibly shaped by the social and economic networks that emerged with the phosphate industry, and these networks cannot be understood without accounting for the agency of workers and their families. I draw on previously unexplored documents from the Gafsa Phosphate Company archives, as well as colonial and post-independence administrative records, military documents, maps, and hospital records housed in both Tunisia and France. From the rise of the phosphate industry in the late 1890s to the French-owned mining company’s gradual nationalization in the 1960s and 1970s, I chart how Gafsa’s workers negotiated with and resisted against local authorities. Specifically, I explore how workers’ actions posed fundamental problems for Tunisia’s urban nationalist elite by revealing fragmentation within a nationalist movement that posited unity, and I examine how workers’ demands created dilemmas for the mining company as it navigated the changing circumstances of the global phosphate market. This paper challenges the dominant paradigm of both Tunisian nationalist and Western historiography, in which Tunisia’s urban coasts drive historical change while Gafsa (along with other rural regions) is passively marginalized. By centering the narrative around Gafsa’s workers and situating them within the networks of capital that developed from the export of phosphates, I argue instead that Tunisia’s integration into late-nineteenth-century and twentieth-century global capitalist markets developed as a multi-actor process in which Gafsa’s workers and their families were active participants. Concurrently, these networks caution us against taking Tunisia for granted as a national unit. Not only do they highlight disunities that the Tunisian nationalist movement has tried to elide, but they also reveal the drawbacks of assuming that Tunisia’s 1956 independence is a rupture point.

This paper explores the narratives of the Palestinian peasants who grew tobacco in Mandatory Palestine. The market expanded rapidly, after many local growers started growing tobacco when the British administration abolished the previous Ottoman monopoly on tobacco and introduced new regulations aimed at reaping revenue through taxes. Subsequently, all tobacco had to be sold to local manufacturers; any independent sale of untaxed tobacco was criminalized and punishable by fines and incarceration. The paper is based on oral history interviews I conducted with peasants in the Galilee. They narrated the ways in which they were exploited and undercompensated by the manufacturers, mostly subsidiaries of the British American Tobacco (BAT) Company, which in effect operated as a monopoly. Peasants also claimed that the British government abandoned them and left them to deal with BAT on their own, a claim that appears to be grounded when examining archival sources. I argue that peasants resisted this exploitation, both as individuals and through collective action. They employed public forms of resistance, such as establishing cooperatives and calling for boycott, as well as in clandestine forms, such as taking part in the unofficial trading in tobacco, which had existed since Ottoman times. James Scott distinguishes "hidden transcripts" from the "public transcripts" of subordinate groups. This discourse is shielded from outsiders, but shared among subalterns. I argue that the peasants narrated their exploitation consistently because it was a part of the shared public transcript. I further argue that the independent and illegal sale of tobacco resulted in the creation of a "hidden transcript,” which was shared with me because of my Palestinian identity. Additionally, I found that a further level of "hidden transcript" existed, consisting of the individual illicit actions of my interviewees. This was perpetuated due to the continuing colonial situation and therefore narrated using different strategies and themes.